THE WRONG GIFT [R, 12-19-19]

What can you do when you get the wrong gift? It’s okay to be sad. I was. But I also wanted to use my gift, so I developed a hook shot that compensated for that ball’s deficiencies.

That’s the ball Uncle Ted and Aunt Nora gave me when I was ten years old. We had moved that year, 135 miles south from the working-class near east side of Indianapolis. to a little hardscrabble farm near Oakland City, my father’s home town, five miles from Francisco, Mother’s home town. It was then that I discovered two important realities: basketball and poverty.

I learned that I needed a basketball, and I learned we were too poor to buy one.

In Indianapolis I did not know about basketball. There was certainly basketball in Indianapolis. After all, Oscar Robertson and I were in school there at the same time. Different schools. Very different. The difference of black and white. And also basketball goal posts.

My Indy school had no sports teams. There were no playground basketball goal posts, or alley goalpost where kids gathered. Oakland City was very different. There every boy, even the grade school kids, had a goal post. And their own basketball. I wanted to be one of those kids.

Uncle Ted and Aunt Nora owned and ran a general store in Francisco. They had basketballs, lined up in bright boxes, on a shelf in that store. They knew I wanted a basketball. So they gave me one for Christmas, perhaps the most thoughtful gift I ever received.

Except it was the wrong ball. The ball inside that box was not the vulcanized balls that had come in after WWII, very similar to the basketballs of today. The ball I received was the old-fashioned type, with light-weight slightly-pebbled sections stitched together with white thread. Inside that covering was a black bladder that you inflated with a long valve that stuck out of a hole. You couldn’t dribble it, especially in a barn yard where farm boys usually had their baskets, up against the barn sides, because it would not bounce true. If you shot from more than a few feet away, the wind would catch that lightweight ball and send it anywhere. Uncle Ted and Aunt Nora didn’t know better. Uncle Ted had been a star with a ball like that thirty years before. It was the best gift ever, exactly the gift I wanted, but the wrong gift.

It was what I had, though, so I used it. I developed a hook shot with either hand that I used from no more than ten feet away. I learned to twirl as fast as I possibly could and release the ball before it could get away from me. Hurled it hard against the back board before the wind could get it. I dismayed many a would-be defender and scored a lot of points with that shot, because I had learned with the wrong ball.  

The very first Christmas gift, Jesus, seemed to most people to be the wrong gift. Most folks who were around then thought God was as clueless as Uncle Ted—well-meaning but not up to date. They wanted a savior of  strength. They got a savior of love. But the wrong gift turned out to be the perfect gift, the gift we always wanted, without knowing it.

Merry Christmas.

John Robert McFarland